know?"

"I've told you," he said. "I think I do."

XXXIII

Three weeks later, one afternoon in October, Jane found herself going at
a terrific pace through Kensington Gardens. Brodrick had sent word that
he would see her at five o'clock, and it wanted but a few minutes of
that hour.

When Tanqueray sounded his warning, he did not measure the effect of the
illumination that it wrought. The passion he divined in her had had a
chance to sleep as long as it was kept in the dark. Now it was wide
awake, and superbly aware of itself and of its hour.

After she had parted from him Jane saw clearly how she had been drawn,
and why. There was no doubt that the folly had come upon her; the folly
that Tanqueray told her she would think divine. She not only thought it
divine, she felt it to be divine with a certainty that Tanqueray himself
could not take away from her.

Very swiftly the divine folly had come upon her. She could not say
precisely at what moment, unless it were three weeks ago, when she had
stood dumb before the wise women, smitten by a mortal pang, invaded by
an inexplicable helplessness and tenderness. It was then that she had
been caught in the toils of life, the snares of the folly.

For all its swiftness, she must have had a premonition of it. That was
why she had tried so desperately to build the house of life for Brodrick
and Miss Collett. She had laboured at the fantastic, monstrous
fabrication, as if in that way only she could save herself.

She had been afraid of it. She had fought it desperately. In the teeth
of it she had sat down to write, to perfect a phrase, to finish a
paragraph abandoned the night before; and she had found herself
meditating on Brodrick's moral beauty.

She knew it for the divine folly by the way it dealt with her. It made
her the victim of preposterous illusions. The entire district round
about Putney became for her a land of magic and of splendour. She could
not see the word Putney posted on a hoarding without a stirring of the
spirit and a beating of the heart. When she closed her eyes she saw in a
vision the green grass plots and sinuous gravel walks of Brodrick's
garden, she heard as in a vision the silver chiming of the clock, an
unearthly clock, measuring immortal hours.

The great wonder of this folly was that it took the place of the
creative impulse. Not only did it possess her to the exclusion of all
other interests, but the rapture of it was marvellously